Contour reduction can be accomplished in various ways. Conventional contour reduction methods include standard coring (i.e., filtering with blending thresholds) and adding random noise (i.e., comfort noise). Since contours can be very wide in terms of a number of pixels, especially in high-definition television, the conventional filtering approaches incorporate very wide (i.e., many taps) and very strong filters (i.e., extremely strong lowpass filtering). The standard coring is good for mosquito noise removal with less strong filtering, but is not appropriate for contour reduction because a strong filtering (i.e., typically a many-point mean/average filter) will cause “halos” around strong edges in the image. Similarly, adding random noise is not always desirable, although the noise can hide many coding and quantization errors including contouring.